Projects

About Me

Monday, January 21, 2013

uDraw graphic tablets are currently on sale for as little as $10, due to them selling well below expectations and THQ being close to bankruptcy as a result. The graphics tablet are available for Xbox360, PS3 and Wii. I wrote a Linux driver for the PS3 tablet, it's available at Github:

As graphic tablets those things are not that great, while they have pressure sensitivity and are decent enough in terms of accuracy, their resolution is just something around 640x360 which leads to very noticeable jaggies when drawing. They do however also double as touchpads, as touchpads they have a resolution of 1920x1080 and support absolute touch, so one can do things such as designating an area of the pad as scroll wheels or other stuff. While they do not have multi touch, they do allow basic pinch&zoom (when two fingers touch, a byte in the protocol gives the distance between the touchpoints). They also come with gamepad-like buttons and a build in accelerometer and they are wireless via a USB dongle.

Overall maybe not the most useful piece of tech, but for that price they make a fun toy to experiment around with. My Linux driver has modes to use the tablet as touchpad, gamepad or graphics tablet.